Itanium not meeting Intel's goals
"Are we meeting the specific goals this year? Not to the aggressive levels we've set," Abhi Talwalkar, general manager of Intel's Enterprise Platform Group, said while answering questions after a speech at the Intel Developer Forum here. Intel once positioned Itanium as the chip that would become as dominant in the server market as the Pentium is among personal computers. But Intel's Xeon processor, which runs the same software as Pentium machines, still accounts for the majority of server shipments, and Intel in recent years has positioned Itanium only as a replacement for competitors' high-end chips, such as Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc and IBM's Power.
Despite the admission, Talwalkar also said Itanium is strong and meeting its long-term goals.
In large-scale servers, Itanium server revenue has been doubling or tripling, compared to year-earlier periods, while increasing tenfold for top-end machines with 16 or more processors. In addition, the number of dual- and four-processor Itanium-based server models has increased from 20 in 2002 to 70 this year, while the number of systems with eight or more Itanium processors has increased from five to 20 during the same period, he said.
